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ScrumPad is an intuitive Agile project management and collaboration tool, built from ground up for teams of any size. Easily manage requirements, bugs, impediments, and test cases. Perform release and iteration planning. Track time and progress. Analyze trends. Collaborate on requirements through flexible messaging. Yet, ScrumPad does most of the house keeping for you while you focus on delivering projects. Although designed with Scrum, and Extreme Programming in mind, perfect for any iterative, incremental development- custom or otherwise. ScrumPad is developed by Code71, an expert in SaaS solution using RoR.

Late last week, Ruby on Rails received a couple of security patches. And, these patches prompted an immediate Rails 2.3.4 release. The vulnerabilities involve a potential weakness in unicode string handling, which may allow an attacker to inject unwanted HTML code into your forms, and a theoretical time-based attack in the encrypted cookie session store. Some issues have been reported with Ruby 1.9, so be cautious when upgrading.

Passenger Preference Pane version 1.3 has been released by the Phusion team Eloy Duran (thanks, keygee). Version 1.3 contains several bug fixes and verifies locally registered host names for your applications.

Issue #4 of the free Rails Magazine was published last week and contains a lot of good content. Tutorials on background processing, generating PDFs, and working with Radiant CMS are a few of the technical bits. It also contains interviews with David Heinemeyer Hanson, Matz, Yehuda Katz, and Koichi Sasada. It's free to read online or you can buy a printed copy on their website.

Richard Huang wrote in to let us know about a new Rails plugin called Bullet. Bullet is designed to help increase your application's performance by monitoring your database queries. Specifically, it watches for places you either should or should not be using eager loading to optimize your application.

Sudara Williams wrote up a great article over on the Engine Yard blog about how most of the memory issues they see with Rails originate with bad ActiveRecord usage. According to Sudara, Ruby tends to be greedy with memory, so creating an ActiveRecord collection with several thousand elements may permanently eat up your system's available memory.

Well, if you're running Ruby 1.9 and can't get a date, it may be because 1.9 is mixing things up a little bit. In Ruby 1.8 the default format followed the US format of month-day-year, however in 1.9, it's taken the European (and most everywhere else) approach of day-month-year. Taylor Redden wrote up a short article on how to monkey patch Rails to revert back to the familiar Ruby 1.8 format.

If you've ever needed to write financial reporting software, you may know the headache of dealing with fiscal years. Or, if you ever find yourself in this situation, a new gem, released by Aditya Sanghi, called Fiscali aims to ease some of your new found financial troubles.

Remember, Ruby5 will be released Tuesday and Friday mornings, due to your feedback for consistent, morning releases. To stay informed about and active with this podcast, we encourage you to do one of the following:

Previous Episodes

RCov and Pony, with a little bit of Hangman make for a good start. We also cover some Rails authentication options and metaprogramming in Ruby. Finally, what's new in Edge Rails and the Rails Rumble results close out this Friday episode.

Blue Ridge, FunFX and Cucumber, and unit testing your file system interactions round out today's episode - which is obviously a little test-heavy. We also talk about obeying robots.txt, Snow Leopard, and more.

Ruby Version Manager, Crondonkulous, and flag_shih_tzu are just a few of the topics covered by this Friday morning episode of Ruby5. Since the majority of listeners preferred morning releases, we're going to try out releasing new episodes on Tuesday and Friday mornings.